Culturally Tailored Aerobic Exercise Intervention for Low-Income Latinas

Abstract

Participants in the exercise group reported more vigorous exercise (p < .001) and walking (p = .005) at post-test than controls. Aerobic dance and unsupervised activity resulted in a five-fold greater increase in relative VO2max compared with controls (p < .001). Although exercise and fitness decreased at follow-up, vigorous exercise (p = .001) and relative VO2max (p < .001) remained higher in the exercise group, suggesting maintenance at 1 year. CONDUSION:. Culturally tailored aerobic dance can increase vigorous physical activity, possibly generalizing to walking, and the combination can improve cardiorespiratory fitness in low-income, overweight, sedentary Latinas.

What are successful recruitment and retention strategies for underserved populations? Examining physical activity interventions in primary care and community settings

“…Eight studies [29,38,48,[54][55][56][57][58] reported on Hispanic participants as all or part (50% or greater) of their study population of interest. Two studies purposively recruited a combination of Hispanic and African American participants [54,56].…”

“…Common administrative retention strategies were to obtain multiple alternate contact numbers for participants [37,53,64], make multiple (10-20) contacts with participants during the study period [31,38,39,45,53,54,57], and maintain detailed databases and tracking registries for participants [29,37,59]. Providing financial or other incentives, transportation, or childcare were also commonly mentioned [29, 37-40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48-50, 54-59, 63, 64].…”

“…This review adds to the existing literature by (1) exploring the relationship between strategies and outcomes for recruitment and retention and (2) Resnicow et al [43] African American girls ages 12-16; Atlanta metropolitan area churches (n=137) Hovell et al [57] Presentations to local schools,at retail outlets, in waiting rooms, and door-todoor guiding the development of "best practices" recommendation for future research in the field, framed within an ecological perspective (Fig. 1).…”

Health Promotion in Latinos

“…¶ In fact, 1 study achieved retention rates as high as 91% at 1 year. 5 Thus, attrition did not appear problematic in this literature compared to similar reviews conducted among African Americans. 45 …”

“…5,6,34 Providing incentives also proved effective at increasing attendance at group sessions and assessments. For example, Hovell et al 5 awarded raffle tickets for attending classes and gave out prizes during each class.…”